Qualcomm Brings Laptop Chip Technology To Mobile Devices For GenAI Tasks

Qualcomm revealed on Monday that it will be bringing the technology behind its powerful laptop chips to its mobile phone chips to significantly enhance their performance in generative AI processes.

At Snapdragon Summit, the world's biggest seller of mobile phone chips unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite, positioning it as "the most powerful and world's fastest mobile system-on-a-chip ever," according to a press release. The Snapdragon 8 Elite features an Oryon CPU, which also powers the Snapdragon X Elite platform for PCs.

The company stated that the Snapdragon 8 Elite "powers a new era of on-device generative AI, built to handle the complexities of multi-modal AI seamlessly while prioritizing privacy."

The Snapdragon 8 Elite debuts industry leading technologies such as the second generation custom-built Qualcomm Oryon CPU, Qualcomm Adreno GPU, and enhanced Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, all touted to deliver game changing performance improvements.

The company said that these innovations empower the Snapdragon 8 Elite to "transform user experiences with their devices – making on-device multi-modal generative AI applications a reality on smartphones powered by Snapdragon."

"We are so excited to bring the power of Qualcomm Oryon to our Snapdragon mobile platforms for the first time," said Chris Patrick, senior vice president and general manager of mobile handsets, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

"Today, our second generation of the Qualcomm Oryon CPU debuts in our flagship Mobile Platform – it's a major leap forward and we expect consumers to be thrilled with the new experiences enabled by our CPU technology," he added.

Patrick further said that the Snapdragon 8 Elite, with leading CPU, GPU and NPU capabilities, delivers dramatic performance enhancements and power efficiency. It also offers personalized, multi-modal generative AI directly on the device, enabling the understanding of speech, context, and images to enhance everything from productivity to creativity tasks while prioritizing user privacy.

Qualcomm announced that major OEMs and smartphone brands, including ASUS, HONOR, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO, Realme, Samsung, Vivo, and Xiaomi, will be launching devices featuring Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC in the coming weeks.

In 2021, Qualcomm hired a group of former Apple engineers to assist in designing laptop chips, which were sold this year, and are powering AI features in Microsoft's Windows.

Earlier this month, Qualcomm announced a quarterly cash dividend of $0.85 per common share, payable on Dec. 19, 2024, to stockholders of record at the close of business on Dec. 5, 2024.